I expect that many of you are familiar with the Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule.) If you aren’t, the simple definition is that for many phenomena 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes. Or – more practically – 80% of your company’s revenue comes from 20% of your customers, or 80% of your problems come from 20% of your customers, or 80% of your employee problems come from 20% of your employees. While it’s overused, it’s a good rule of thumb.
I was in a meeting the other day where we were talking about the concept I described in my post “The First 25,000 Users Are Irrelevant” that built off of Josh Kopelman’s superb post titled “53,651 ” (which appears to need to be updated to 100K due to the ever increasing readership of TechCrunch .) We were deep into a discussion about user generated content and how communities tended to grow. I’ve had plenty of experience observing this at Judy’s Book , working with several new content companies that I’ve invested in, and closely following the discussion that made the rounds about the 1% rule as it applies to Digg (e.g. 1% of the Digg users generate most of the Digg’s – resulting in Jason Calacanis offering to pay these 1% of Digg users to bookmark for Netscape .)
I get the 80–20 rule. I get the 1% Rule. But what about those other 19%?
It dawned on me that the gold is in the other 19%. Maybe this is obvious, but here’s how I’m thinking about it. Assume a web site content business (or social network, or bookmarking service, or something else along those lines) that incorporates user generated content (or user interaction) as a core part of it. Apply the 1% Rule. You’ve got your active users – these are the folks that are going to create content “just because.” In some communities I’m part of that 1% and – when I think about why I participate as actively as I do – I always have some non-standard rationale or motivation (or – more abstractly – the behavior and motivation of the 1% doesn’t scale to the rest of the community.)
Now apply the 80–20 rule. 80% of the users are the site are simply going to be fly bys. They won’t engage deeply – they are merely skimming / scanning content. It’s nice to have them, but they are the consumers, not the contributors.
That leaves 19%. This is the golden segment. If you can figure out how to engage these folks, you win. If you don’t, you’ll have a site driven merely by the 1%, which ultimately won’t scale. While theoretically the law of large numbers should apply (e.g. as N (= number of users) gets big enough, life is good), I hypothesize that if you don’t figure out how to engage this 19%, you won’t drive growth in N that will get you big enough to have the law of large numbers effect deliver you to happiness. There’s a virtuous cycle here – the 1% disproportionately seeds the activity of the site, the 80% consume content, and the 19% sit on the fence. If you can get the 19% to engage, this drives more vibrant content, which increases reach, which increases N, which means the activity driven by the 1% and 19% increases, which drives more content, etc.
Now – the 19% don’t have to contribute as much as the 1% (in fact, if you believe in the power law or are a long tail disciple – the sum of the contribution of the 19% probably equals the sum of the contribution of the 1%.) In addition, the critical mass associated with the 19% gets you to a true 80/20 rule (vs. a 99/1 rule) – which – if you buy into the Pareto principle – has very powerful (positive) implications.